An employee referral program is an internal recruitment system where employees refer people from their social networks to fill in an open position in the organization that is open for hire. This system motivates employees to refer potential candidates and in turn, their employer rewards them with a referral bonus.
Employee referral is regarded as the most efficient and cost-effective recruitment method and has now been widely embraced by employers as a recruitment method in most companies. Here are 3 ways employee referrals can help your business:
1. Employee Referrals Save Your Business Time
One of the biggest priorities for businesses is to save time by embracing more streamlined processes. Things keep moving fast and as such, there’s no time to waste. No one wants to spend too much of it on a single activity, and for businesses, the recruiting process can take up a lot of time which shouldn’t be the case.
Research done on recruitment shows that the process of conducting a job interview and deciding on a candidate to fill up a position can take up to 20 days to complete. But with employee referral programs, employers can save so much time.
Recruiting referred candidates can make the process much faster by cutting out some of the screening steps involved and allowing recruiters to focus more on the main areas like analyzing a candidate’s resume. This way, the suitable candidate for the position can be chosen in the shortest time possible.
2. Employee Referrals Helps Your Business Have An Engaged Workforce
Giving your employees a chance to recruit people from their social networks to fill up a position in your organization goes a long way in developing an engaged workforce within your company.
The newly recruited referred employees have a sense of belonging from the first day they start working since they have a close acquaintance within the workforce. It is easy to sync them with the company’s culture since they have someone who they strongly connect with that can easily consult with.
Your current employees also have a sense of trust and value owing to the fact that they get to contribute in some of the major decisions of the organization like recruitment and they get a financial reward if their candidate is selected for the position. They feel motivated to participate in the process and this gives them the interest to be more engaged in the company’s activities.
3. Employee Referrals Sponsor A High Employee Retention Rate
To get the best skills and talent to fill a position within your organization, use your employees to link you up with the most suitable people for the job through referral programs. The candidates that you hire through the referral programs always hold their positions for longer periods compared to the ones recruited via other methods.
This is so because the employees who refer them paint a clearer picture of the organization to them and they come in with a deeper understanding of how things are done. This makes them come in prepared and quickly adapt to the organization and develop a commitment that keeps them loyal to the company for a long time.